Our Sunday Visitor May 19, 1996

What St. Augustine would say to America

By William Bole

What is our business "within this common mortal life?" So asked St. Augustine during the twilight of the Roman Empire. And so asks Jean Bethke Elshtain during what she fears is the moment of moral decline for a democratic empire -- the United States.

A Lutheran with a penchant for many things Catholic, Elshtain has written a book, "Augustine and the Limits of Politics" (Notre Dame, $22), to be released this spring.

Elshtain, a professor of ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, recently spoke with Our Sunday Visitor about the sinner who became a saint, the young heretic who converted to Christianity in 387, and the guidance he can give today to a democracy in crisis.

VISITOR: Why is St. Augustine still with us, alive in our conversations 1,500-plus years after his signature work, "Confessions"? Why do we keep returning to him over and over again?

ELSHTAIN: Because we sense in him someone who has bridged the enormous distance that separates his time from ours. His biographer Peter Brown mentions that he has come closer than any of the ancients to coming close to us. And why is that?

It seems to me in part because when we read Augustine, we know this is a man who had passionate love for the world, who grappled with the issues we have to grapple with, who understood the questions of love and hate, the yearning for community and yet the call to solitude.

He understood the temptations of the lust to dominate, and the necessity to hold those kinds of urgencies in check in order that we may serve God and neighbor.

VISITOR: In "Confessions," St. Augustine laid bare his soul to the world, to history, in a way nobody had done before. Today, people seem to be in a confessional mode of sorts. You see them on daytime talk shows, revealing their secrets, their addictions. Can we pin that on St. Augustine? Was he the confessional forefather?

ELSHTAIN: Absolutely not. If you want a forefather of all that, you should probably look to Jean Jacques Rousseau and his "Confessions," which could be more aptly titled, "This is the Story of Me." Today we're into the theology of "me," the politics of "me," the psychology of "me." And that's what we see at these confessionals -- the garrulous, aggrandizing self that knows no limits.

In contrast, Augustine's confession is primarily a profession. It's a profession of his yearning for and love of God. It's a profession of his movement away from a stance of pride and self-conceit.

He was a young man on the rise, a capable, brilliant provincial who came to Rome and Milan to study rhetoric. He had admirers. And he gave it all up. He gave up a world in which he could be the center of all things in order to humble himself, to be filled with another way of being in the world, a way that was less prideful.

So when he confesses, he's confessing in part the rueful recognition of his own limitations and his own astonishment as he gazes upon the extraordinary mysteries that the human mind, as intricate and canny as it is, can never entirely plum. It's just impossible to see in that the origin of the tawdry, vulgar stuff we see on television in the afternoons.

VISITOR: What can you say about Augustinian pessimism? It has been used to justify all kinds of evils -- war and economic injustice and so on. Is this as it should be? Was St. Augustine really so down on the possibilities of human betterment?

ELSHTAIN: No, no. I think that's been tremendously overdone by people who have offered up a rather cursory reading of Augustine and too quickly rush to assimilate him to thinkers like Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes.

He certainly is a realist -- both a political realist and a moral realist. He realized that we act in a world in which all too often there is no right or wrong thing to do.

There may be two wrongs rather than a right, and you may have to choose the lesser evil. Augustine doesn't crave these dilemmas; these are inherent in the situation in which people find themselves.

Some of the attacks on his pessimism come from people who believe that to have political hope means you've got to be a starry-eyed idealist, almost utopian.

But Augustine would say that if you have more limited and reasonable hopes, then you're actually likely to create a situation of somewhat greater justice, somewhat more decency. And that's no small thing.

VISITOR: So the goal of absolute economic equality, to take one example, would be considered a utopian fantasy?

ELSHTAIN: Yes, but I think he would go about the argument this way: We find ourselves in a situation in which there are growing disparities between people, and this in no way can be justified.

So how do we ameliorate this? How do we deal with this in a way that doesn't, in fact, bring more suffering, more dislocation, more trouble than we already have.

VISITOR: You say in your book that you picked up "Confessions" at a time when you were questioning faith in general and your Lutheran faith in particular.

ELSHTAIN: That's right. And I found Augustine to be a haunting figure. He was, for me, a beckoning figure in a way that St. Thomas Aquinas simply wasn't -- which is not to take anything away from St. Thomas Aquinas, but he didn't grab me in the same way.

The arguments in Aquinas's "Summa Theologica" are much more legalistic in the way they are cast, and I'm much more drawn to Augustine's "narrativity," his painting with broad strokes.

VISITOR: It drew you off the path of youthful atheism?

ELSHTAIN: Well, I had never gone that far. I would say agnostic was as far as I ever got.

VISITOR: In the book you speak of St. Augustine as a companion on your own intellectual journey. Does that road by any change go to Rome?

ELSHTAIN: I see myself as halfway in between -- and to answer your question, I really don't know. But certainly it's a possibility that I'll no doubt continue to entertain.

VISITOR: But what brings you this far? You say in the book that you find yourself looking south, to Rome, more than north, to Wittenberg.

ELSHTAIN: That has partly to do with my reading of Augustine and discovery of the whole tradition of the Church when I studied medieval history as an undergraduate. And I've continued to engage the Church, partly through the study of Catholic social thought.

So my engagement with the Church, if you will, has been an ongoing one for 30 years now. I'm just assuming it will continue. And where it will end up, I just don't know.

VISITOR: Can you draw a link between St. Augustine and your previous book, "Democracy on Trial" (Basic Books, 1995)? What would be St. Augustine's verdict on the United States?

ELSHTAIN: Augustine would agree with me that American democracy is in trouble, in part for the reasons I've talked about -- the incivility, the decline of any kind of commitment of any sort to the common good, to the possibility that we might have a good in common we can't achieve alone. I think he would agree we've become harsher, more cruel to one another, that the habit of neighborliness is shriveling and shrinking among us.

Given his insistence that we should do no harm and help others whenever possible, I think he would be extraordinarily dismayed by the fact that we seem to find it harder and harder to do that, that many of the arenas within which that gets done -- civic associations and so on -- have been on the decline.

All you have to do is look around at the violence and materialism. It would look to him a lot like the late Roman Empire he so often criticized.

VISITOR: Does a reading of St. Augustine suggest any solutions?

ELSHTAIN: We really can't look to him for solutions in the sense of one, two, three, four.

What we could do is look to him for some guidance on how we should think about what it is we hold dear. I think he would say, "You're not going to be able to find your way at all within in any of this unless you look at the way your willing tends."

What is it that you love? What is it that you care about? Is it advantage? Is it power? Is it wealth? If so, then you're part of this situation in a big way. There has to be some transformation here. People have to first realize that there is something dreadfully awry.

VISITOR: So there is no Augustinian agenda?

ELSHTAIN: No, I think that would be a misuse of him. He can do a lot for us, but he's not going to tell us exactly what public policies to endorse. But it seems to me there are some questions he would help us to ask. He would ask, "Does this or that policy or position make the world more cruel or more kind? Does this flow from selfishness or from a more generous spirit?"

He would tell us, "Answer those questions and let that be your guide."

Bole is a senior correspondent for Our Sunday Visitor

[SIDE BAR]

The politics of St. Augustine

In her new book on St. Augustine, Jean Bethke Elshtain offers "a few bits of instant wisdom on Political Augustinianism," what she once called a "way of looking at the world":

(1) Augustine does not view political order as an agency for human progress. He is extremely skeptical about the possibility that politics holds out hope for human improvement or the unfolding of the fullness of human virtue. Is not man a creature characterized by perversity of the will, plagued by fleeting desires, prone to sin, error and perverse actions? Not too much can be expected from him.

(2) Evil is real. Man cannot be reformed.

(3) Augustine has a "tough-minded, realistic view of power." He sees power as the result of attempts to dominate. Power is not natural. It is devised by man. Power cannot be escaped; it can only be restrained.

(4) Authority must be treated with deference and respect but there is nothing inherently legitimate about it. It is a symptom of the fact that human beings do not spontaneously treat one another with love and affection.

-- From "Augustine and the Limits of Politics," University of Notre Dame Press, P.O. Box L, Notre Dame, IN 46556; (219) 631-6346.

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